by ken winston caine

Reliable, detailed monographs on medicinal herbs are available free, online, from the North Carolina Consortium on Natural Medicines.

They come in three flavors:

1. For health professionals.

2. For everyone else.

3. For growers.

You can access any of them.

They are limited to herbs that can be grown in North Carolina — so you won’t find an extensive list of medicinal herbs here. But the information you will find is very thorough and well vetted.

Find them here: (more…)

by ken winston caine

Want to lose 20 pounds in the next 30 days?

Make your diet boring. Boring and simple, says Tim Ferris, best-selling author of The Four-Hour Workweek.

That doesn’t mean no variety or tasteless meals, Ferris explains.

He provides four simple rules for losing weight quickly, while building muscle, and — exercise is NOT one of them. (Click the link below to see all four rules — and the exact diet he is using.)

The rules look nutritionally sound. And they are based on results from scientific studies.

Why make your diet boring? Because it’s easier to follow that way, he says.

“The most successful dieters, regardless of whether their goal is muscle gain or fat loss, eat the same few meals over and over again,” he writes in a blog post at (more…)

by ken winston caine

Naturopath Leslie Taylor maintains an extraordinary database of known information about medicinal herbs on the rain-tree.com website. A nice feature: It includes the scientific (and other) citations.

Much of the information comes from Taylor’s book, The Healing Power of Rainforest Herbs.

To look up an herb, go to: (more…)

by ken winston caine

USA Today reports that new parents are leading the fight against our widespread exposure to health-robbing, mutagenic toxins in plastics.

In one of the more comprehensive and serious examinations of the health threats from plastics and plastic food containers, USA Today reporters Elizabeth Weise and Liz Szabo, note in the copyright story, among other things:

• “Parents, activists and many scientists are concerned that if a baby drinks from a bottle made with [plastic chemicals] bisphenol A [BPA] or gums a toy made with phthalates, he or she could suffer serious, even permanent, harm.”

• “In December, the National Toxicology Program, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, concluded that one form of phthalate, called di(2-ethylhexyl), or DEHP, used in intravenous tubing, catheters and other plastic medical equipment, could pose a risk to the proper development of baby boys’ reproductive tracts.”

• “Nearly every American has been exposed. A 2000 study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found

(more…)

by ken winston caine

I have just made the most remarkable 3,000-year-old discovery that instantly soothes aching, inflamed muscles and nerves and relieves pain and inflammation.

And can’t believe that it’s taken me all this time. I must have first read about this technique at least 30 years ago and “learned it” again in numerous herbal medicine courses over the years.

The forgotten, ancient medical miracle used thousands of years ago in India and China and in other folk-medicine traditions in more recent centuries?

The ginger compress.

Just a hot, moist pack of ginger placed over acutely inflamed muscles and nerves.

I’d never tried it, having lost faith in herbal compresses years ago when I found that most I experimented with seemed to have no discernible healing power beyond the effect of the moist heat. Not so with the ginger compress. It really works. REALLY works. Fast.

It costs pennies, takes seconds to make. You probably already have the makings on hand in your house if you raid the spice cabinet and improvise a bit. And it instantly draws away the swelling and pain… Even better, the effect is lasting.

I’ll tell you how I made it in a moment. (more…)

A report on a couple studies — one published in Chinese — suggests a strong link between bra wearing and breast cancer.

Other studies report a link between bra wearing and breast cysts and breast pain. The cancer link has not been medically established, but has not been scientifically disproven either.

The first and largest study that suggested such a link was by Sydney Singer and his wife Soma Grismaijer. They conducted a five-city survey of 4,500 women in the U.S. While that’s a large sample for a study, the work has been criticized as not meeting high medical research standards. The couple’s alarming findings are summarized on the website 007b.com as follows:

• 3 out of 4 women who wore their bras 24 hours per day developed breast cancer.
• 1 out of 7 women who wore bras more than 12 hour per day but not to bed developed breast cancer.
• 1 out of 152 women who wore their bras less than 12 hours per day got breast cancer.
• 1 out of 168 women who wore bras rarely or never acquired breast cancer.

That tallies to a 125-fold increase in the incidence of breast cancer among women who wore bras around the clock versus those who rarely or never wore bras.

The American Cancer Society dismisses the study and its conclusions as not being scientifically rigorous and says, “There is no other, credible research to validate this claim in any way.”

However, it appears that is not quite true. (more…)

by ken winston caine

It is possible that bottled water is making you fat . . . and that it causes cancer.

Really.

The plastic bottles of designer water that you see people carrying everywhere are NOT good for you…

Packaging water in small plastic bottles has staggering environmental costs — both in the manufacturing process and in the waste-stream created when the bottles are used and tossed in the trash. You’re beginning to read a lot about that aspect of the $15 billion bottled-water obsession.

What you’re not hearing about — yet — are the little-known, but severe, personal health costs — the long-term damage you can suffer from consuming foods and liquids packaged and stored in plastic or plastic-lined containers.

It may take mainstream health and media another 10 years to get onto this. But you shouldn’t wait. You should get onto it now.

Writer Charles Fishman’s fascinating and exceptional piece of in-depth health-and-business investigative journalism in this month’s Fast Company details exactly how the plastic bottled water craze is hurting you and the planet.

Click that link and read the article.

Should you stop drinking water?

Should you stop carrying water with you?

No.

No, no, no, no, no…

The solution is simple: (more…)

by ken winston caine

If you are battling weight gain, should you cut carbs? Cut fat? Either, neither?

It looks like there really is an easy way to know.

• Cutting refined carbs seems to help every body lose weight and is especially essential for those who pack on the fat around the stomach — the classic spare tire and apple shapes.

• Cutting fat intake results in

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Been surprised while reading nutritional information and ingredients on food labels recently.

Since the beginning of the year, food manufacturers have been required to list on the label the amount of deadly trans fats in each serving.

But I’m discovering that foods labeled “0 grams trans fats” often do have trans fats in them. The ingredient label says so. Mentions “partially hydrogenated” oils of one kind or another.

So, “0 grams trans fats” does NOT mean zero trans fats. All it means is less than 500 milligrams of trans fats per serving. And, as supersize Americans know, very few of us eat just a “serving” of anything.

And most important to know, there is NO safe amount of man-made trans fats for human consumption. It is believed that the body can metabolize from 1 to 2 grams daily of organic trans fats found in tiny tiny amounts in vegetables, nuts, meats and so on. But there is no amount of man-made trans fats (partially hydrogenated oils or highly heated vegetable oils) that is safe for consumption. Not 1 to 2 grams. Not 500 milligrams.

To put “less than 500 milligrams” into perspective, consider this:

The federal government’s “recommended daily allowance” of Vitamin C — a nutrient essential for life and health — is only 60 milligrams for adults. That’s PER DAY.

Yet the same federal government allows food manufacturers to pack more than 8 times that much of trans fats — a deadly substance known to clog arteries– into EACH SERVING of foodstuffs and to then label the food as having “0 grams of trans fats.”

499 mg of trans fats is a pretty potent slug. And it can be cumulative. You can eat a serving (or more) of several foods at a meal that each have “0 grams trans fats” according to the label but secretly are destroying your health by pumping trans fats into your bloodstream.

Trans fat labeling is a (more…)